As the title of this reads, the point of this thread is to discuss the male Wizard and to speculate on his background. For those unaware, the Wizard class' journal entry on the official web site refers specifically to the female character. Does this mean that should we pick the male version of the Wizard, the story will be identical but simply with male pronouns instead? Or will he have his own unique back story?

Current speculation is that the male Wizard hails from Aranoch, based primarily on his decidedly 'Middle Eastern desert attire'. However, I disagree that his clothes specifically of that design or even particularly different from what the female Wizard wears. Take these two concept arts for example:

The 'Middle Eastern influence' could easily be applied to these as well (at least as much as it is to the male Wizard), particularly the latter one, which I feel carries the strongest resemblance. Yet, the character is known to hail from Xiansai.

But if this is not the case, what's his back story? To take a more traditionally Asian folklore-esque spin on it, I like to think that he too hails from Xiansai and is in fact the female Wizard's more socially responsible elder/twin brother sent to track down his wayward sister. I mean, if any of the stories are to interconnect, it makes the most sense that it would be the male and female counterparts of each class.

he studied at the same arcane school as the female wizard and was in love with her. He was going to marry her but it turned out that his master actually has feelings for her as well and tried to kill him, so he went on the run.

I'm not really sure if he's going to have his own special story line. I really think that Male/Female is going to be for pure aesthetics and have nothing to do w/ the lore.

I could be wrong though.

Well, it's been confirmed that the male Barbarian is in fact the same Barbarian from Diablo 2 and as such is familiar with Deckard Cain. So, unless the female Barbarian is revealed to be either the Amazon or Sorceress (which would be weird), or if they retcon technology so that sex change operations are available, the male and female Barbarians will have different storylines. Granted, this might be unique to them but why stop there?